The Puppet Production Studio is Born.

We've been really busy at the theater down the street from my house, making a movie called "Sockzilla." This picture is of our narrator, Buck. Named after his teeth of course. We shot the video on a Flip video recorder and dumped it into my computer - then I emailed everyone the edited movie. I'm going to give them the rough footage too so they can edit themselves if they want to. We also have lots of outtakes of course.
This second picture is of our bad guys - Cyc (a one-eyed fellow), Travis who is a hippie with a pipe cleaner guitar, and our main villain, Sockzilla. At this point the bad guys have been sentenced to community service and are cleaning up bird poop in the local park. Sockzilla is missing an eye that fell off sometime during the last scene.
This has been a great class - the kids made the puppets and then we did "screen tests" with them, to get their personalities going. Then one student wrote a script, they all made scenery, and we were off. The last day was jam packed since we had to shoot the whole script in one session.
There are so many things you can do when creating theater in miniature like this. You don't have to memorize lines since you can read while your puppet "talks." You can plan scenes - in fact we found out quickly that having too many characters on screen at once became physically impossible for all the puppeteers crouching out of camera range.
I'm looking forward to doing more of these - they are just full of possibilities!!